[tz] State of Palestine Time zone - need to update

Fred Gleason fredg at paravelsystems.com
Fri Feb 12 15:33:11 UTC 2021


On Feb 12, 2021, at 05:14, Paul Eggert <eggert at cs.ucla.edu> wrote:

> At some point we need to say that tzdb is about civil time, not about settling or documenting other political disputes. We might as well say it now rather than later.

If this is the policy (and I think it is the correct one), then we need to become utterly consistent about its implementation. There are really only two consistent possibilities:

TZ identifiers are arbitrary and immutable. Or they’re not. 

If the first is true, then they should *never* change. Ever. For any reason. (*Additional* ids can of course be introduced, but that’s a different situation, already well covered in the theory document). Of course, this means that the ostensible “meaning” of the various IDs will slowly drift away from correspondence with political realities over time. Oh well. They’re arbitrary. Deal with it.

To say that ‘TZ identifiers are arbitrary tags’, but then go ahead and change *some* of them in response to various forms of special pleading does nothing but open the project up to charges of being arbitrary and capricious. No wonder the politicians are confused about the process. It’s a confusion that we ourselves have fostered. Until and unless we consistently apply this policy, these arguments about names are going to be endless.

TZ identifiers are arbitrary and immutable. Or they’re not. Which is it going to be?

Cheers!


|---------------------------------------------------------------------|
| Frederick F. Gleason, Jr. |             Chief Developer             |
|                           |             Paravel Systems             |
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| "On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament],     |
| `Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will |
| the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the |
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|                                                -- Charles Babbage   |
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